Forum status?

Comments

As soon as I opened it up again there was spam. That's with captchas, email verification (they're literally verifying then spamming...), all social logins disabled, and the spam plugins enabled and configured. We really need a replacement for Vanilla Forums at this point that can import the old content over...

Manually approving applicants would be okay, but Vanilla Forums just sucks for managing them, and we're at 17626 applicants at this point. That's just crazy!

I'm not sure, but it's definitely a lost cause sorting all those applicants. I've read everything I could find on Vanilla Forums and spam prevention, so I'm not sure there's much left to try there. I'm open to suggestions for a replacement for the forum! ;)

Other than that, I'm just updating all the docs and then getting the new website up. The new site is just on my laptop for now, but if you want to see where the documentation is so far, you can clone it into an Elefant site via git clone https://github.com/jbroadway/elefant-docs.git apps/docs then visit /docs. I haven't thought much past those things just yet, but I'll keep you posted.

I think I'll look at MyBB, FluxBB and SMF more closely. I'm sure I could whip up an importer if need be. It's the user accounts that could be trickier to move over, but I guess I could just create new accounts for all active users and email everyone with their initial info, that way we keep our post histories as members.

I may do something like that soon. Just realized I had no message for new visitors so I added that quickly. Need more hours in the day! Small but unexpected things keep popping up and throwing me off track... :P

I didn't actually look at the permissions as closely as I usually do. Usually I'm fairly cautious and notice things like that.

It seems like Gitter is aiming to be *the* chat tool for Github projects, so I thought this would be a good test trial . I tried running an IRC channel for a while, but my time online is fairly inconsistent so there were always large chunks of time when I wasn't around. This will probably suffer from the same issue, but thought it was worth trying out.

I guess it depends what the membership for the forum is going to be composed of. Gitter might be good for developers, but it might scare away people that are just trying to use elefant to build a site.

It seems like chat could be a good secondary form of support on an ongoing basis, in addition to a forum fix, so it would be good to find one that fits us well. I suppose reopening an IRC channel is also an option, and there is an existing page on the site setup for quick access to it (just not linked to from anywhere):

They all seem like decent options, but it's all pretty new to me, so my opinion is fairly uninformed. (I didn't have a github account until I started using elefant.) I guess I'm thinking of other noobs like me that are used to forums, email, and that's about it. ;) But that may not be elefant's target audience, and it will hopefully be somewhat moot once the new forum is in place. Or would glassboard, gitter, and/or irc be the replacement for vanilla?

I don't think these would replace a forum (and I definitely need to get on migrating that *soon*). Here's a quick assessment of our chat options:

IRC: Old school, popular in open source, familiar to older users but not as much to younger ones. Mobile experience will vary, but apps exist.

Gitter: Could become the standard chat tool for Github projects, but very new. Github requirement may be off-putting, and the permission request is alarming. Desktop integration is nice, says mobile apps coming soon.

Firechat: Open source but depends on a commercial service (could outgrow free), requires a bit of setup ourselves but not much. Mobile app support limited.

Don't think you should rule out VBulletin. It is solid, well-supported, and comes with a full range of import options. It is relatively inexpensive for what you get, and it is extrememly configurable. We have VBulletin forums with over 20,000 users that have been running fine for more than a decade. I'd certainly chip in some dollars towards a licence.